PRESSED AGAINST THIS SMART GLASS
Happen to find yourself a particular afternoon notice a makeshift craft
floating through the narrow and bounded by steep shoulders waterway
Notice fairies harnessed/ boiled a ramshackle armada of miracles from the comparative
wilderness caught that afternoon
Care evidently distrusting the order ‘wanted alive’
Hollowed out logs lashed to a skinny man w/ a burlap sack deemed to be snoozing
A rent in the net under the weight of streams blanketed with moss
The sun already knows my nickname
An arrow shot clean through my ribs
Clock fragmented clots of day
plan/ plant/ drain the fertile forest hills
the wilderness riding me
out across out-of-print autobiography
w/ a resonance of mathematics learned bargaining sharply
for apples can tease murderers and settlers to domesticate the frontier with old world exotics
Disparagement might return a golden habitat
an emblem of marriage
from man’s peculiar craft
passengers point at a sign
working for food
waiting for the bumblebee to wake up to hover among wide eyed
We give credit the power domestication represents
take to dance
Generations assume naive scenes
Animals sit it out
Nutritious acorns buried any arrangement with us long before
boatloads dependent on bank territory or at least the folk hero I figured
Modest our orchard or/
our childlike wishful/ wistful thinking
how lost
We accept fate in the tang of strangeness sweetened beyond recognition
a blemish free plastic dimension
one all-purpose-single-use-just-as-described-cheap-fake-sugar-substitute for the strong desire to
live to
lounge in queerness
with no address
Hallow defiance
a night swim
a vegan frontier
do you mind
to ride a horse or punish a worm
Children are not rumors
For some cis-godfearing-rapist-white-men emphasis relies on her dress/
color of skin/ mitigation/ migration/ maps
Some far flung account/ song led to the river
the reality and the pipe littered behind
An LGBTQ+ multi-genre artist, Valyntina works with paint, ink, Neon, encaustic medium, recycled or repurposed materials and words. She is the author of the tête-bêche chapbook Fever Dream/ Take Heart (Cathexis Northwest Press, 2020) and In Our Now (Finishing Line Press, 2022). Find her at valyntinagrenier.com or Insta @valyntinagrenier